Speech Act

Yesterday saw a mini-celebration of the 35th anniversary of Neil Kinnock's 1985 Labour party conference speech, with various people too young to have heard it first hand claiming to have been inspired. Its current utility is, of course, as an encouragement for Keir Starmer to start purging the contemporary left, though the current leader seems more interested in establishing his credentials as a social conservative and may well feel that the left is unlikely to present a challenge now that the right has successfully recaptured the party apparatus. What everyone remembers about Kinnock's big day in Bournemouth, or thinks they do, was the condemnation of Militant, but the organisation had been proscribed three years earlier so Kinnock didn't even deign to name it. The insults were indirect and coded. The wider context for the speech was Labour's unwillingness to practically support the NUM during the recently-concluded miners' strike and its attempts to distance itself from the "loony left" in local government. The criticism of Liverpool City Council was as much a coded attack on the GLC, while the dismissal of "posturing" was directed at Arthur Scargill as much as Derek Hatton.

The 1985 speech was first a diagnosis of the traumatic 1983 general election defeat and second a prognosis for how Labour could not just beat the Tories but hold off the advance of the SDP Liberal Alliance. That election would prove more pivotal than 1979, extending Thatcher's initially unpopular administration on the back of the Falklands victory and a split anti-Tory vote (the Alliance got 25% compared to Labour's 27%), and establishing the narrative of centrist modernisation that would eventually birth New Labour in the 1990s. For all of Kinnock's passion, the diagnosis turned out to be a tame acceptance of the Thatcherite dispensation with gestures towards greater managerial competence, while the prognosis - essentially that moderation and an appeal to the virtue of the public would restore Labour to power - proved naive during a half-decade that would be marked by contempt for social solidarity, a commitment to personal enrichment and Westminster sleaze. You can draw your own parallels to the present moment.

Kinnock started his speech by criticising the Tories for not living up to their own promises in areas such as law and order, the family, enterprise and freedom. This was an example of his undoubted rhetorical skill, but in highlighting the gap between appearance and reality - the Conservative fixation on "presentation", as he put it - he implicitly accepted many of the Tories' premises. Consider the following: "How is it that the party that promised to roll back the state has arrived at the situation where 1,700,000 more people are entirely dependent on the state because of their poverty during the time the Tories have been in government? ... How does the party of enterprise preside over record bankruptcies? How does the party of tax cuts arrange that the British people now carry the biggest ever burden of taxation in British history?" Kinnock wasn't employing irony but actually agreeing that families shouldn't be dependent on the state, that we should cherish business and that high taxation was a burden.

Central to both Kinnock's diagnosis and prognosis is the idea of change as both a threat and an opportunity, which is worth quoting at length: "We live in a time of rapidly and radically changing technology. We live at a time of shifts in the whole structure of the world economy; we live at a time of new needs among the peoples of the world and new aspirations among young people and among women – late but welcome new aspirations among half of humankind ... Change cannot be left to chance. If it is left to chance, it becomes malicious, it creates terrible victims. It has done so generation in, generation out. Change has to be organised. It has to be shaped to the benefit of a society, deliberately, by those who have democratic power in that society; and the democratic instrument of the people who exist for that purpose is the state – yes, the state. To us that means a particular kind of state – an opportunity state, which exists to assist in nourishing talent and rewarding merit; a productive state, which exists to encourage investment and to help expand output; an enabling state, which is at the disposal of the people instead of being dominant over the people."

For all the prefiguring of Marxism Today's "new times", the idea of the state as an enabler of opportunity, focused on production rather than distribution, wasn't a novel departure in Labour thinking. All of this had been outlined in Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism in 1956. Despite habitually citing Aneurin Bevan, Kinnock was signalling his adoption of Gaitskellite "revisionism". Though backward-looking, this had a topicality and urgency in the mid-80s after the decimation of British industry during Thatcher's first administration. But despite the crowd-pleasing gesture towards capital controls in the speech (a remnant of the influence of the Alternative Economic Strategy advanced by the Bennite left), and a dismissal of the Tories' "non-unionised, low wage, tax-dodging, low-tech privatised" vision, this was essentially a plea for the labour movement to facilitate capital's recomposition of the UK economy and hope for the best. It is for that reason that Kinnock nowhere mentions the miners' strike, which had so recently revealed the strategic focus and tactical brutality of British capital in its contemporary guise of Thatcherism.

Though internationalism has become a dividing line between the right and left of Labour since the 1980s, Kinnock was still speaking at a time when support for the global left and Atlanticism were not considered incompatible, hence his speech included rhetorical back-slaps for the anti-apartheid movement, Solidarnosc, Russian dissidents and democracy in Chile and Nicaragua, as well as a crowd-pleasing commitment to both nuclear disarmament and NATO. This was entirely gestural, which is ironic given his condemnation of the "gesture-generals" of the domestic left. The first three recipients of his solidarity turned out to be triumphs for capital, while the debate on what truly constitutes democracy in South America has now moved on to Venezuela and Bolivia. By contrast, Keir Starmer's first conference speech as leader mentioned "abroad" only tangentially, in a criticism of the government's intention to break international law and a promise that "We’re not going to be a party that keeps banging on about Europe", while the word "comrades", which Kinnock used 14 times, was nowhere to be seen (nor was "socialism").

The contentious commitment to nuclear disarmament was, faute de mieux, presented by Kinnock as an example of integrity: "We want to honour our undertakings in full in every area of policy. We want to say what we mean and mean what we say. We want to keep our promises, and because we want to do that it is essential that we don’t make false promises". This provided the segue into the final section of the speech, which begins with explicit electoralism and an implicit criticism of conference for adopting a load of policies that might jib with the "decent values and aims" of the ordinary voter. At this point Kinnock proceeds to damn the left for "slogans" and "implausible promises". The famous attack on Liverpool City Council is not quite the peroration, but it comes around 90% of the way into the speech. It suggests that Kinnock knew full well that only the last section would be of interest to the media, for whom a Labour leader's speech is only a success if it involves berating the party membership for their presumption and foolishness, and he was determined not to disappoint them, hence he even cues the TV cameras at this point ("People say that leaders speak to the television cameras"). 

The smattering of boos amid the applause was clearly anticipated: "Comrades, the voice of the people – not the people here; the voice of the real people with real needs – is louder than all the boos that can be assembled. Understand that, please, comrades. In your socialism, in your commitment to those people, understand it. The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency-tacticians." This distinction between Labour activists and the people was a theme throughout, and culminated in an example of the "elitist left" trope that is such a feature of Tory and Labour right propaganda: "Comrades, it seems to me lately that some of our number become like latter-day public school-boys. It seems it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game." The actual peroration, when it finally arrives, is boilerplate pragmatism: "Principle and power, conviction and accomplishment, going together. We know that power without principle is ruthless and vicious, and hollow and sour. We know that principle without power is naïve, idle sterility". 

The media reaction ranged from the rightwing focus on Labour's continuing problems with Militant and the "loony left", with some asides about Kinnock's windbaggery, to liberal glee at the Labour leader's conversion not only to moderation but to modernisation and professionalism, which was emblematically marked that year by the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Labour's Director of Communications. James Naughtie in the Guardian caught the vibe: "Mr Kinnock prompted an ecstatic ovation by telling his party that electoral victory could not be achieved by 'pious faith or by dreams' but by 'working for it, planning for it, organising for it'". The irony here is that Militant had been proscribed in 1982 not for dreaming but for organising. It's also worth noting that Naughtie was not quoting from Kinnock's actual speech but presumably from a separate briefing, indicating the importance that "spin" would come to have in the reporting of Labour politics over the next two decades.

Kinnock's speech is remembered today as the start of the process by which the Labour left were ushered off the stage and the scene set for the arrival of Tony Blair, but this ignores that the left had already been largely sidelined by 1983, not simply through the proscription of the always-marginal Militant but with the more significant defeat of Tony Benn in the Deputy Leadership election of 1981 and his absence from Parliament immediately after the general election, which prevented him running for Leader after Michael Foot's resignation and opened the door for Kinnock to emerge as the "left" candidate. While some Militant stragglers would be expelled by Labour after 1985, the purging of the broad left from positions of power was carried out mainly by the Thatcher government through the abolition of the GLC and the other metropolitan county councils. Kinnock would lead Labour to two general election defeats, though he can claim to have reduced the Liberal Democrats (as they became) from 25% to 17% over 9 years. Blair's victory in 1997 was down to the collapse of the Conservatives after Black Wednesday, when they lost 4.5 million votes of which 2 million shifted to Labour. What mattered in the end was not Labour's moderation or virtue but the Tories' proven incompetence.